Gerald Holton at The MIT Reader:
In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell branded Einstein’s theory of relativity as “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and His Creation,” and as implying “the ghastly apparition of atheism.” In alarm, New York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked Einstein by telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.”
In his response, for which Einstein needed but 25 (German) words, he stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” The rabbi cited this as evidence that Einstein was not an atheist, and further declared that “Einstein’s theory, if carried to its logical conclusion, would bring to mankind a scientific formula for monotheism.” Einstein wisely remained silent on that point.
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February 15, 1942
Experimental therapies with radically different approaches are stirring a wave of optimism that survival rates could substantially improve for pancreatic cancer, one of the most stubbornly lethal forms of the disease. Giving doctors and patients more options to standard chemotherapy would “increase shots on goal” and perhaps even make the dreaded diagnosis manageable over a number of years, according to experts.
For Zohran Mamdani, it has been a pretty sunny start.
In 1994, 
Large language models’ ever-accelerating rate of improvement raises two particularly important questions for alignment research.
Ahmed Douma has always known the time would come. He knew that the prison cell would take him back. Over the past three years, while Ahmed and I worked together on translating his poems into English, there were many close calls. Periodically, he would be notified that he was under a new investigation for yet another absurd “false news” charge. Before every summons, he would text me: “The poems, Abdelrahman. I entrust them to you—keep the poems alive.”
It may be conventional wisdom that the young are more likely to drive trends, but apparently 250 isn’t too old for the job. After all, on the eve of 
Our cells produce energy in biological power plants called mitochondria. These energy-makers have minds of their own. They operate using a unique set of DNA and can travel outside cells. Like astronauts, they often escape in fatty bubbles, land on other cells, explore them, and sometimes literally fuse with native mitochondria in their new homes.
The dog launched itself into me. Suddenly I was rolling on the ground, kicking and swinging and screaming for help. I could feel the teeth clamped into my calf, the jaws tearing and grinding. The dog released and bit again.
I originally came to South Africa from Sweden for a postdoctoral project with the University of Cape Town during the city’s Day Zero water crisis in 2018. As households faced the possibility of taps running dry, I studied how people adapted to sudden environmental constraints. That experience shaped my interest in how urban residents relate to nature under pressure, when it is no longer something distant, but something that directly shapes everyday life.
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted Elon Musk in early March 2020, his first public comment on COVID-19. (It was also his first tweet to earn more than one million likes.) To him, the true virus was informational. The cybernetic collective of social media functioned like a communal id, where posts spread not because of their truth but their “limbic resonance.” “You can’t talk people out of a good panic,” Musk told Joe Rogan, “They sure love it.” By late March, he had landed on a new phrase for the phenomenon: a “mind virus.”
CATHERINE BREILLAT HAS THE HOTS for Rhett Butler. The French novelist and film director mentions the conceited cad played by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind (1939) no fewer than three times, always in the context of attraction, in I Only Believe in Myself, a book of interviews conducted by Murielle Joudet in 2022 and 2023, now appearing in an English translation by Christine Pichini. It might be unexpected for an auteur closely associated with transgression to so frequently invoke a character from classical Hollywood, a cinema hemmed in by the Hays Code in what it can say or show. When Breillat elsewhere declares her debt to the “absolute violence” of the Comte de Lautréamont’s iconoclastic poetry and asserts that “beauty ought to be cruel and frightening,” it feels more in keeping with the spirit of an oeuvre that has been celebrated, censured, and censored for its fearless depictions of sexuality. From her first book, L’Homme facile (1968), which she published at seventeen only for it to be banned for readers under eighteen, to her most recent film, Last Summer (2023), which presents without condemnation the story of a lawyer’s affair with her teenage stepson, Breillat has gone where few would dare. The breasts of an overweight twelve-year-old, lipstick traced by a stranger around a suicidal woman’s asshole, chopped bits of live earthworms dropped onto the vulva of a teenage character: “I’m not ashamed to show every kind of depravity,” she says. “I’m familiar with it. I don’t glory in it, but I know that it exists.”